US Special Warfare with Clandestine Paramilitary Units

Horhey · Sep 20, 2012

Im just reviewing the origins of the system. It's an overview. Nothing specific to a particular country. I have all that in my back pocket and will take hourse to put together.

The death squads were mostly special units from the Latin American military and security forces who usually wore civilian clothes and operated at night so the armed forces wouldnt take the heat for the political killing even though everyone knew were part of the security apparatus but the media played a long and reported them as "uncontrollable right wing bands:"

The American connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador

By Michael McClintock (Amnesty International)

A 1966 US Army Military Review article reproduced in the Guatemalan Revista Militar described "counter-terror" first in World War II terms: "... if a bridge is blown up. detain all of the villagers of the area and execute a few hostages".

The most radical proposal, and most representative of the new school of counter- insurgency, appeared in a separate, special "Secret Supplement" to the main body of the Classified report. There, General Yarborough's prescription was the was the organization of secret paramilitary groups to carry out violent covert actions against the domestic opposition; his recommendation amounts to a formula for setting up the "death squads" that have been a major element of counter-insurgency in Latin America since the 1960's:

It is the considered opinion of the survey team that a concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training. This Structure should be used to as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known Communist proponents.
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Washington's definition of a "communist" was best explained by CIA operative, General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano, the founder of ORDEN and ANSESAL in El Salvador:

You discover the communist by the way he talks. Generally, he speaks against Yankee imperialism, he speaks against the oligarchy, he speaks against military men. We can spot them easily.

--General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano"the father of the Death Squads, the chief assassin of them all"
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Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990

By Michael McClintock

A principal message of the 1960 manual was the need to react unconventionally to insurgency: The normal rules and conventions of war went by the board ("No rote, drill or other rigidly defined tactics or techniques can be prescribed in the conduct of suppression operations"). Action prescribed ranged from classic small-unit engagements to the deliberate use of terror: "The majority of government operations can be classified into one or more of the following general types: a) Meeting engagements; b) Attacks; c) Defense; d) Ambushes, 'Q' Operations and Provocative actions; e) Raids; f) Pursuit actions; g) Interception actions; h) Terror Operations."

The prescription of terror for American counterinsurgents-and unconventional warriors-remained a feature of American doctrine in the 1960s and afterward, although such terror was generally described through the more oblique term counterterror (counterorganization described the paramilitary forces). "Terror Operations" would take the form of campaigns of assassination, "disappearance," and mass executions in many countries in subsequent decades, and would remain a hallmark of the counterinsurgency state in the 1980s.
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"You Learn How To Torture ..."

Rene Hurtado is the pseudonym of a former member of the Salvadoran Treasury Police who now lives in a Minneapolis suburb. In an interview in late March, he said that the Treasury Police, a branch of El Salvador's security forces, would routinely kidnap, interrogate, torture and then kill political suspects. He claims to have participated in torture sessions and provides a detailed account of the methods employed.

According to Hurtado, US personnel conducted an intelligence course for Treasury officers that included training "in methods of physical and psychological torture." He claims to have met with the US instructors. Though he refuses to say whether he himself received training from them, he asserts that some of his associates did.

The intelligence course was given for one month in 1980 at the headquarters of the Salvadoran army general staff, Hurtado says. The instructors did not observe or participate in actual torture sessions, nor did they visit Treasury Police headquarters, he explains. But in the classroom, he says, they discussed such techniques as psychological torture, manual beating, and electric shock, occasionally supplementing the lectures with Spanish-language written material that was more generalized than the oral presentations. The instructors were sometimes in military uniform, sometimes in civilian dress.

Hurtado, who gave his real name but asked that it not be used, showed documents and photographs verifying his military and Treasury Police service.

At one time, Hurtado held a sensitive position for which he was carefully screened. Following a fight with a superior officer, he was expelled from the military in 1981, he says. he resides in the United States without legal immigration status and is being sheltered by the religious sanctuary movement. He was contacted directly and independently after another former member of the Salvadoran military provided his home telephone number.

What follows is Hurtado's account of the interrogation and torture methods used by the Treasury Police:

You learn how to give electric shocks, shocks to the brain, shocks to the stomach. There are some very sophisticated methods for this kind of torture. It's a little machine; you use a cord like a telephone, like an old phone with a crank and you start turning the crank. You do it with different wires; they're small. There's a more sophisticated one that looks like a radio, like a transformer; It's about fifteen centimeters across, with connecting wires. It says General Electric on it.

You put the wires on the prisoner's vital parts. You place the wires between the prisoners's teeth, on the penis, in the vagina. The prisoners feel it more if their feet are in water, and they're seated on iron so the blow is stronger. If you put mineral water on them and then do the shock, it's agonizing.

In general, you will kill the prisoners because there's an assumption they shouldn't live. If we pass them to the judge, they'll go free and we'll maybe have to pick them up again. If there's lots of pressurelike from Amnesty International or some foreign countriesthen we might pass them on to a judge, but if there's no pressure, then they're dead. When it's over, you just throw him in the alleys with a sign saying Mano Blanco, ESA (Secret Anticommunist Army), or Maximiliano Hernandez Brigade [three names commonly used by Salvadoran Death Squads].

--Rene Hurtado, Salvadoran Treasury Police agent
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Horhey · Sep 20, 2012

From a detailed study by Human Rights Watch's Michael T. Klare and the National Security Archive's Peter Kornbluh:

The New Interventionism: Low-Intensity Warfare in the 1980s and Beyond

by Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh

For American troops to prevail in low-intensity warfare, Colonel James B. Motley wrote in Military Review, "the United States should reorient its forces and traditional policies away from an almost exclusive concentration on NATO to better influence politico-military outcomes in the resource-rich and strategically located Third World areas."

"We depend heavily on some of these nations for strategic minerals and energy resources," Weinberger informed Congress in 1984. "Our economies and the economies of our allies are, therefore, especially susceptible to disruption from conflicts far from our own borders."

This "different sort" of conflict, according to LIC planners, requires a "different sort" of U.S. response. "The roots of insurgencies are not military in origin," Secretary of the Army John Marsh explained, "nor will they be military in resolution." This analysis has led to an emphasis on nontraditional forms of coercion-economic, diplomatic, psychological, and paramilitary-what Colonel Waghelstein bluntly describes as "total war at the grass-roots level."

For the Reagan team, this accumulation of U.S. "defeats" in the Third World was a bitter pill. "The escalating setbacks to our interests abroad," Secretary of State Alexander Haig proclaimed when the administration took office in 1981; "and the so-called wars of national liberation, are putting in jeopardy our ability to influence world events." Given the long history of America's quest for world paramountcy, it was inevitable that Washington would seek to redress its losses, reassert its power, and attempt to restore its global dominion to the halcyon days of the- Cold War.
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US Special Warfare with Clandestine Paramilitary Units

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